Emulation systems provide circuit and system designers powerful methods to functionally test out systems and integrated circuits before committing them to production. Circuit designers and engineers use emulators to convert a design into temporary operating hardware, thus enabling the engineer to test the design at or near real time conditions. Additionally, the engineer can concurrently verify the integrated circuits, system hardware and software. Examples of emulation systems are described in U.S. Pat. No. 5,109,353 to Sample et al. and U.S. Pat. No. 5,036,473 to Butts et al., both of which are incorporated by reference.
Typically, the design process involves multiple transformations of a design from the initial design idea level to the detailed manufacturing level. An engineer may start with a design idea. The engineer may then generate a behavioral definition of the design idea. The product of the behavioral design may be a flow chart or a flow graph. Next, the engineer may design the system data path and may specify the registers and logic units necessary for implementation of the system. At this stage, the engineer may establish the procedure for controlling the movement of data between registers and logic units through buses. Logic design is the next step in the design process whereby the engineer uses primitive gates and flip-flops for the implementation of data registers, buses, logic units, and their controlling hardware. The result of this design stage is a netlist of gates and flip-flops.
The next design stage transforms the netlist of gates and flip-flops into a transistor list or layout. Thus, gates and flip-flops are replaced with their transistor equivalents or library cells. During the cell and transistor selection process, timing and loading requirements are taken into consideration. Finally, the design is manufactured, whereby the transistor list or layout specification is used to burn fuses of a programmable device or to generate masks for integrated circuit fabrication.
Hardware description languages ("HDLs") provide formats for representing the output of the various design stages described above. These languages can be used to create circuits at various levels including gate-level descriptions of functional blocks and high-level descriptions of complete systems. Thus, HDLs can describe electronic systems at many levels of abstraction.
Hardware description languages are used to describe hardware for the purposes of simulation, modeling, testing, creation and documentation of designs. Previously, circuit designers tended to design at the logic gate level. Increasingly, designers are designing at higher levels, particularly using HDL methodology. HDLs provide a convenient format for the representation of functional and wiring details of designs and may represent hardware at one or more levels of abstraction.
Two popular hardware description languages are Verilog and Very-High-Speed Integrated Circuit (VHSIC) Hardware Description Language ("VHDL"). VHDL began in the early 1980s within the United States Department of Defense and it was intended initially to be a documentation language for the description of digital hardware systems. Later, the language was refined so that descriptions could be simulated and synthesized. The advent of HDL-based design tools including design entry, simulation and synthesis has subsequently shifted VHDL's focus from design documentation to high-level design. Other hardware description languages include, but are not limited to, A Hardware Programming Language ("AHPL"), Computer Design Language ("CDL"), CONsensus LANguage ("CONLAN"), Interactive Design Language ("IDL"), Instruction Set Processor Specification ("ISPS"), Test Generation And Simulation ("TEGAS"), Texas Instrument Hardware Description Language ("TI-HDL"), Toshiba Description Language ("TDL"), ZEUS, and NDL.
Simulation has long been a preferred method for verification of logical correctness of complex electronic circuit designs. Simulation is broadly defined as the creation of a model which, if subjected to arbitrary stimuli, responds in a similar way to the manufactured and tested design. More specifically, the term "simulation" is typically used when such a model is implemented as a computer program. In contrast, the term "emulation" is the creation of a model using programmable (also known as reconfigurable) logic or field-programmable gate array (FPGA) devices. Simulation saves a significant amount of time and financial resources because it enables designers to detect design errors before the expensive manufacturing process is undertaken. Moreover, the design process itself can be viewed as a sequence of steps where the initial general concept of a new product is being turned into a detailed blueprint. Detecting errors at the early stages of this process also saves time and engineering resources.
Simulators can be divided into two types. One type of simulator follows levelized simulation principles, and a second type follows event-driven simulation principles. Levelized simulators, at each simulation cycle, have to reevaluate the new state of every component of the simulated design, whether or not the input signals of the component have changed. Additionally, the component's state has to be retransmitted even if the state has not changed. Event-driven simulators only evaluate those components for which some input conditions are changing in the current simulation cycle. Consequently, event-driven simulators achieve considerable savings in component evaluation time. However, significant additional software runtime is spent on the decision-making of whether a particular component should be evaluated. As a result, both types of prior simulators (levelized and event-driven) have similar performances.
The primary advantage of emulation over simulation is speed. Emulation maps every component under verification into a physically different programmable logic device, and therefore all such components are verified in parallel. In a typical simulator, however, the single processing element serially computes the next state of each component at every simulation time step.
Emulation is an efficient verification technology for designs represented as or easily converted to a network of logic gates. Modem design methodology, however, requires that at the initial design stages, large design portions are represented by behavioral models. Through a series of design decisions these behavioral models are gradually replaced with equivalent structural representations. Correctness of each replacement step is subject to verification, at which point the design presents itself as a complicated mix of behavioral, structural, and gate-level components. Structural parts of the design can be directly mapped into emulation hardware using widely available logic synthesis programs. Behavioral portions, however, can only be compiled into computer programs and executed. By its nature, emulation requires creation of a model using actual hardware and therefore cannot be used at the early stage of the design cycle when the concept of a new product is not yet represented by its components but rather by a high-level description of its functions. Therefore, to conduct verification at earlier design stages, the most appropriate environment would efficiently combine the features of emulation and behavioral simulation. Furthermore, combining emulation and simulation enables a designer to simulate design components that cannot be emulated because of physical constraints such as analog signals.
As the design approaches completion, emphasis naturally shifts away from behavioral simulation and towards logic emulation. However, the parts that represent the operating environment of the future product may never be converted to a structural representation. In this case, the behavioral description of the system-level environment serves as a test bench for the emulated design. The system-level behavioral description generates test stimulus and evaluates the responses of the design under verification in a way that closely replicates the real operating conditions. The need to execute such behavioral test benches is another motivation for combining the simulation and the emulation capabilities in one logic verification system.
One approach to combining emulation and simulation is to run a simulator on a host workstation (or network thereof) communicating the events or changes in signal state to and from the emulated portion of the design over a network interface. However, in such a solution, the speed of event transfer seriously limits performance. Experiments show that the average time to transfer a 4-byte data packet over transport control protocol ("TCP") running on a SUN workstation computer (e.g., a SPARC-20) is around 50 microseconds. Assuming that a data packet of such size is used for encoding an event and given average design activity of 1000 events per simulation cycle, the speed of simulation will be limited to 20 cycles per second. Therefore, there currently exists a need for combining emulation and simulation to efficiently verify circuit designs that may be a mixture of gate-level, structural and behavioral representations.